52 Inspiring Autobiography Quotes

Life stories have a powerful way of connecting us, bridging the gaps between diverse experiences, and offering profound insights into the human condition. Autobiographies provide a window into the intimate thoughts and pivotal moments that shape remarkable individuals. Within these personal narratives, certain quotes resonate deeply, encapsulating wisdom, perseverance, and inspiration. In this collection, we delve into 52 thought-provoking autobiography quotes designed to uplift and motivate. Whether you're seeking a spark of creativity, a dose of courage, or simply a moment of reflection, these quotes promise to leave a lasting impression. Join us as we explore the transformative power of lived experiences through the voices of those who have walked the path before us.

1. “A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.” - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

2. “Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.” - Stephen Fry

3. “You must have me confused with myself” - Michael Palmer

4. “I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.” - Kelly Cherry

5. “I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.” - Mark E. Smith

6. “Dialogue in the works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But 'Are you playing, Bob?' is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any Arsenal player (for the record the others are 'How's the leg, Bob?' to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; 'Can I have your autograph, please?' to Charlie George, Pat Rice, Alan Ball and Bertie Mee; and, well, 'How's the leg, Brian?' to Brian Marwood outside the Arsenal club shop when I was old enough to know better) and I can therefore vouch for its absolute authenticity.” - Nick Hornby

7. “Ever met a sympathetic doctor? No ways. They’re always impatient, glancing at the watch, calculating the price of your sickness against the price of another pair of shoes for the bitch wife with the reluctant cunt.” - Ian Martin

8. “You never know what’s lurking in the bloodstream, or skulking under the foreskin, or squatting in the liver, or flitting hither and thither from branch to branch in the bronchial forest.” - Ian Martin

9. “But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.” - Jeffrey L. Staley

10. “... A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already.” - David Crockett

11. “I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written about the same events, or who have a decent expectation of anonymity, or who are such appalling public shits that they have forfeited their right to bitch.” - Christopher Hitchens

12. “Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: 'try on' a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the 'fit' and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies' dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. 'Mariam,' he said as if by way of explanation, 'has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.' On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.” - Christopher Hitchens

13. “I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.” - Don DeLillo

14. “Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.” - Robert A. Heinlein

15. “Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.” - W.H. Auden

16. “If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.” - Shannon L. Alder

17. “My limitless ability to weave time and space does not make me a god - just a da-n good writer.” - Edmund Alexander Sims

18. “What Turning Forty Means to MeI need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn't used to have to do that. But now I do.” - Tina Fey

19. “Sometimes, the way around prejudice is education.” - Liza Mundy

20. “Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Criss Jami

21. “I believe that we are who we choose to be.Nobody is going to come and save you. You've got to save yourself.Nobody is going to give you anything. You've got to go out and fight for it.Nobody knows what you want except you, and nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.So don't give up your dreams.” - Barry Manilow

22. “I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.” - Francoise Gilot

23. “Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.” - Meghan Lamb

24. “The features of character are carved out of adversity.” - Rick Barnett

25. “In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography--proper work for tired artists--but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies--they know better.” - Arthur Miller

26. “Watching large mammals living their ordinary life in the jungle is extraordinary” - Antonio Rossano Mendes Pontes

27. “Freed from the thoughts of winning, I instantly play better. I stop thinking, start feeling. My shots become a half-second quicker, my decisions become the product of instinct rather than logic.” - Andre Agassi

28. “Monotony is the only reward of the cautious” - A. Somebody

29. “Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel” - Frederick Weisel

30. “Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.” - Frederick Weisel

31. “be always sure you're right, THEN GO AHEAD!” - David Crockett

32. “better to keep a good conscience with an empty purse, than to get a bad opinion of myself, with a full one.” - David Crockett

33. “I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others .Osman Gulum” - Osman Gulum

34. “An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.” - W.H. Auden

35. “Former police chief of Houston once said of me: “Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it ‘U.R. Hooked’ and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver’s license for identification.” - Frank W. Abagnale

36. “I think I was about twenty-five when I first said - more or less to myself - that I was quite a good second-rate poet. I repeated it aloud in a Guardian interview in 1976, and some people thought I was a coy old thing.” - John Pudney

37. “Dylan [Thomas] I knew before and after he became famous. He was splendid, rapacious, demanding as a young man. To much has been written about him for me to add to the legend. As that legend began to grow in his lifetime I learned to separate him from his poetry, to find him in person increasingly tedious and his poems increasingly exciting, both in print and when he was reading them.” - John Pudney

38. “If I wrote an autobiography, I'd have to sue the author for defamation...” - Seeley James

39. “Някой може да ти е приятел,но е възможно никога да не си прекрачвал бариерата на десетте сантиметра между вас,никога да не си го прегръщал продължително,да не си го виждал никога как се събужда.” - Albert Espinosa

40. “It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.” - Bill Bryson

41. “I was awarded 'Most Aggressive Rider of the Day', generally given to the most spectacular loser of the day.” - David Millar

42. “Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.” - Stephen Fry

43. “Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.” - Stephen Fry

44. “What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.” - Randy Alcorn

45. “Too embarrassed even to try as long as everyone was looking at me, I made what was probably a fairly unique request. ‘Um, I’ll have a go. But I can’t do it if you’re all looking at me. Can I go inside the wardrobe and sing from there?’ The others looked at me strangely, possibly beginning to worry about the apparent absence of any stage personality in this girl they had just recruited, but to their credit they agreed, without killing themselves laughing, and so in I went. From inside my hidey-hole I sang David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’. I emerged to a very positive response, the others all declaring that I sounded like Siouxsie Sioux – I was trying very hard to – and while I was quite pleased with myself, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do it in front of an audience. We could hardly take the wardrobe around with us.” - Tracey Thorn

46. “a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.” - Samuel Johnson

47. “Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn’t come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew.” - Anne Moody

48. “...if it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography—and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation—then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant.” - Joseph Conrad

49. “It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life “I used all my potential and all my talents and pushed myself to the limit. I could not have fought any harder.” - Charlotte Eriksson

50. “Tell the Truth. Make it Special.Life’s a Beach. And then you Drown.Good Ideas cost no more than Bad Ones.” - Justin Allison

51. “No Man lives who has not seen some of his prayers granted.” - Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

52. “If you don't invite God as a summer guest, he will not come in the winter of your life" said Lahiri Mahasaya” - Sri Paramahansa Yogananda